I agree with the general idea of learning through doing. But buddy if your teaching system depends on suffering of the students, maybe them using AI is a symptom and not the problem you need to solve.
before chatgpt i simply didn’t do all homework; if it was too tedious i said “fuck it” and left it out.
obviously that tanked my grades but i’m not in school to get good grades, i’m in school to learn interesting stuff.
The issue is that only some of them intrinsically want to get gud. They want other people to do the shit they don’t want to do. They’re happy to let a robot do the stuff they’re bored by but there are things that for some reason some teachers think is super important every student learn but are actually just shit the teacher is emotionally attached to. I know, I work at an after school program. We have no curriculum but most of my fellow counselors are also teachers (or substitute teachers) and they are obsessed with getting ALL of the kids to care about every topic they teach. I get along with them interpersonally, and one is even my friend but they are petty tyrants with the kids IMO and I get into methodological arguments with them here and there.
Most kids have a niche, I say let them focus on it. Not try and force all of them to be jack of all trades unless its bare bones basics of functioning (Reading, writing, math, scientific method/reasoning).
I remember being a kid that loved reading and writing, did great (lots of 100s or at least 90+) at generic vocab/english assignments and the like. But then whenever I had to read a book I did not give a shit about or write an essay about something I had zero interest in it was like I was trying to telepathically push an mountain with a single functioning neuron. I just couldn’t do it at all so I’d get zeros on those assignments.
The moment the book seemed cool or the writing topic was fairly open ended I usually did fantastic and even surprised teachers in a few cases. Had it been available to me I 100% would of ChatGPT’d the shit I did not care about but I’d totally do the stuff I was intrinsically interested in anyways without ChatGPT.
I hated it when teachers would get narcissistic. But in universities it becomes a huge issue. There are computer science majors in my campus that are bored by math and programming so use chatgpt.
They are bored by the degree they chose themselves. So instead of changing degree plan or learning to enjoy it as a hobby like you would normally do, they just cheat.
Professors’ workarounds are worse. Universities do not execute any “academic dishonesty” actions because they are the ones giving students free chatgpt account after a deal with openai.
So professors either use AI flaggers that give false positives and give everyone 0, or more commonly just give extremely hard exams to offset homework grade inflation.
They are bored by the degree they chose themselves. So instead of changing degree plan or learning to enjoy it as a hobby like you would normally do, they just cheat.
I mean, a lot of people go into a degree because of the promise for jobs even if they aren’t into it. Especially computer programming.
I was one, I could have tried getting a Software Design degree but everyone and their brother wanted to be a designer and there was like a tenth of the number of jobs available for such a position. So I went for software programming instead. Which turned out to be its own mistake.
Can confirm, in college I mostly partied and screwed around, but thanks to years of practice at procrastination I had by then developed the skill of throwing anything together at the last minute. So I could go to the library after dinner the night before a paper was due, find the right shelf, grab a handful of books and write a rough draft of an essay in couple hours. Back in the dorm by 10pm, I would make some edits, type it up (this was in the typewriter era), and turn it in on time for at least a B. But like I said, this was after years of putting off assignments in elementary and high school. Turns out this is an extremely valuable skill in office environments, where due to poor planning there’s frequently some crisis that has to be solved ASAFP. People who can come through with decent work under completely unrealistic deadline pressure become all-stars. LPT: if you’re actually doing that and not getting the credit and rewards you deserve, move somewhere else - you’ve valuable.
People who can come through with decent work under completely unrealistic deadline pressure become all-stars.
I did this for my last company. We were about to lose our biggest client because we (not including me) had agreed to an impossible deadline to deliver a piece of software for them. I spent two weeks basically living at work and we (meaning mostly I) were able to deliver a bare-minimum product on time and keep our contract with the client alive. This kept our company intact long enough for us to be acquired by a major west coast tech giant - at which point I was rewarded with a layoff notice, while my bosses got millions in stock grants. I got a severance which was basically equal to what I would have been eligible to get from unemployment, which meant I didn’t get any unemployment but at least I didn’t have to pretend to look for work for six months.
I did it with no illusions about what my reward might or might not be. I just don’t like being involved in any way with project failures.
We were about to lose our biggest client because we (not including me) had agreed to an impossible deadline to deliver a piece of software for them. I spent two weeks basically living at work and we (meaning mostly I) were able to deliver a bare-minimum product on time and keep our contract with the client alive. This kept our company intact long enough for us to be acquired by a major west coast tech giant - at which point I was rewarded with a layoff notice, while my bosses got millions in stock grants.
Did this radicalize you? This would have radicalized me.
I was radicalized in the '80s. Nothing has surprised me since then.
we used to do this thing called “learning”.
It’s called git gudding now.
git -f gud
Isn’t that gud gitting?
I dunno the man page lists it as git-gud
I think using ChatGPT for learning is okay, assuming the user is actually interested in learning. If you just want to get something done, you’re absolutely cheating the task at hand, and your future self.
ChatGPT truly shines when you ask it follow-up questions on the thing you want to learn about and really “delve” (hate that AI ass word) into different aspects to internalize them yourself.
The dangerous part is that it makes stuff up and you won’t have the knowledge to tell.
Exactly. I had a colleague who searched for a question about a retail math formula. The LLM returned a result that was close but slightly wrong. She spent two weeks with incorrect numbers for her baseline and as a result her forecasts were all wrong. When reviewing her numbers, everything was just a little wonky so I dug into it and discovered her mistake. She was absolutely dumbfounded the “AI” even could be wrong and tried to argue that I was incorrect. Dug out my old retail math cheat sheet and showed her the correct formula.
I haven’t used LLM’s for anything since. Gotta validate all that shit anyways, so why use it at all?
These things will be fantastic for taking my order at the drive thru and in a few other applications, but if you’re trying to learn from them; don’t.
I was a kid in the era of separate pocket calculators, so I’ve heard so much of this song and dance before. Even with deterministic tools that always work barring user error you need to have enough understanding that you can tell when something is off and to properly frame the problem
But that’s not how they’re selling LLM’s. Even the common name AI is dishonest marketing bull.
Well, yeah, you have to have a brain and actually verify things. It’s like Wikipedia circa 2004.
Except when it lies. Then it is the opposite of what you want it to be.
Using chatgpt to do your school work is like paying/beating up a nerd to do your work for you. You won’t learn shit, and there is a chance you’ll get in trouble for cheating.
Except, the nerd will probably do the school work correctly.
Not if they are smart enough to know it would be suspicious if the dumb student suddenly started getting 100℅, so they purposely fudge a few answers.
Zoomers are worse the fucking boomers and alphas are going to be worse still.
My nephew wants to be instantly good at things and it drives me crazy. He’ll roll his eyes and say "of course you’re going to make that shot (in billiards) or get frustrated that’s he’s not amazing without practicing in martial arts, video games, golf, fitness, etc. I’m sure he’ll grow out of it, but in the meantime he won’t work at it or accept instruction. I’m like “yeah dude, I’ve done this thousands of times. Let me help you!”
My youngest (now 27) has a bit of a problem with that. The issue is that he’s smart and most things always came easy to him. He’d do those giant writing assignments the night before that are supposed to be worked on for weeks and still get the high grade. Hardly ever seemed to study, but got solid A’s. But when something comes along that he’s not automatically good at, he gets super frustrated. He wanted to learn the guitar in high school (I play a little), so we bought him one and some basic instruction, but he hated it because it didn’t come naturally. It’s a decoration on his wall.
I will give him this though: he decided a few years back that he wanted to learn to draw, and that didn’t come naturally, but he’s continued to work at it and has gotten pretty decent. So it’s something a person can get past.
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That’s certainly a possibility.
This is a common trap for intelligent people. Because of years of everything being easy you have that expectation for every situation. You never learn how to challenge yourself. Additionally your identity and social status was built on always being capable and smarter than others around you.
When suddenly you run into something that actually takes study and dedication, you just don’t know how. Studying and persistence are learned skills. It’s also embarrassing and causes you to shy away. Things seem impossible if you have no experience of being challenged. Depression and avoidance takes over.
Before you know it you’re middle aged and never did any of the amazing things that everyone expected of you as a child prodigy. Potential was capped at the level that requires no effort.
I think the Jungian concept of the Puer Aeternus describes this very well.
My wife is really smart and says she just “sees” the answer to math problems. Ask her to multiple two 3-digit numbers and she does it quickly in her head. Was never like that for me, I always have to work the process even for simple things, it’s never obvious. I got a CS degree with a math minor, and took some pretty high level math classes. It was always the same for me: learn the process, then work it through, whether it’s number theory or multiplying two numbers.
My wife didn’t get a degree, but she went back to school as an adult. When she got to the first math class that had symbolic/algebraic notation, she ground to a halt initially. She couldn’t just see the answer, and she had no practice working through the process. Was a real slog for her.
Being brilliant is a gift, but you need to learn to work the mental muscles too.
This is basically why I believe that effortless As in grade school are a failure state for kids. People tell me that mu standards are too high for my kid, but I cannot express to them that now is the time for my kid to build up the ability to struggle and persevere. It’s not that I have high standards. I just think that a perfect score is a sign that the task wasn’t hard enough.
I saw way too many kids burn out in college because they’d never seem a grade below an A before, let alone the C they just scored. Since I was used to being pushed to my limit in grade school (not by my mother, but by teachers), I was fully prepared to work hard to barely make a B sometimes.
I was the kind of kid to get good grades without really trying, and I think I would have been better off if I had been challenged. Instead I just coasted, and when I got to calc2 I failed. I still don’t have great learning habits.
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I think learning to be happy with a B is an important skill. I don’t believe that As should be effortless. If an A is effortless, then that means the kid wasn’t in a challenging enough class. In real life the only reward for hard work is more work. Leaning when they want to push for the A and when they want to be content with a B is an important think for them to decide. Perfection should never be the goal. That’s how kids burn out at the college level.
Hmm, mixed emotions here. On the one hand, I agree that grade school kids are capable of much more than we typically teach them. I remember a 5th grade teacher who taught us math up through fractions, and then not getting anything new in math until like 8th or 9th grade.
On the other hand, I don’t think making it a struggle, with a scale that tells most of them that they didn’t quite measure up, is the way to successfully teach young kids. That 5th grade teacher I mentioned made the class fun, and we weren’t aware that we were leaning stuff at a faster rate than the other classes. It was all very positive.
If my kid thinks that being less than perfect is a personal failing then I have failed as a parent. That’s the point of challenge my kid. To teach her that she doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s a B is okay. Doing your best is okay. Hell, doing what you feel like is okay as long as you hit that minimum standard which is a C.
I don’t intend to make my kid struggle for a B, but As should not be effortless. If my kid isn’t putting in the work then I don’t think they should get an A. I think it’s okay not to have an A. I was always a solid B student even in college and I was and still am okay with that. It made me a chiller kid in college and it gave me space to learn how to expand my capacity because I was so shocked by how “poorly” I did.
I think the difference with his guitar playing and drawing was that he probably just didn’t enjoy learning guitar. Tons of people buy an instrument to only learn later that they didn’t like it as much as they thought. Not trying to say you don’t know your kid, just pointing out that learning an art requires an interest to put into it. It can definitely be frustrating to realize that you aren’t as interested in the learning process of something you had dreams of being good at.
I hear what you’re saying, but I honestly think it was just motivation and maturity. I gave you two examples, but there were a number of things that he got very frustrated about when they didn’t come easily. Some were school subjects, so he didn’t have a choice and had to keep pushing at it, and would eventually get there. In fact, he didn’t learn those things more slowly than anyone else, it was just that he was used to getting things instantly.
There’s zero doubt in my mind that he would enjoy the guitar, but he wasn’t mature enough to get past the initial frustration at the time.
That’s good to hear, and I’m glad your kid is figuring it out! Very good point about those that are gifted sometimes needing to work harder at learning to, uh, learn.
Teach him to fail. Those kids are afraid of failing because somewhere in life someone traumatized them so they don’t like to ever fail at anything.
*teach him to grow from failure
In order to grow from failure one must learn to fail
That first lesson was so hard to learn
I’m his uncle. Of course he’s familiar with failure!
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” - Bruce Lee
Edit, in the same spirit: “The difference between a novice and a master is that the master has failed more times than the novice has even tried.” - No idea who
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“Every champion was once a contender who refused to give up.” - Rocky Balboa
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Daniel : Wouldn’t a fly swatter be easier?
Miyagi : Man who catch fly with chopstick accomplish anything.
Daniel : Ever catch one?
Miyagi : Not yet.
– Karate Kid
I love the feeling of neurons rewiring to form a new pathway of understanding. Or whatever the hell it is. At 38, it’s a pleasure finding I can still learn and build new skills.
Playing Beat Saber and hitting a plateau only to find my focus starts to evaporate over the course of a hard track as I find that flow, that path to just being in it, each skill plateau merely being temporary, is great. Playing guitar and slowly starting to wire my brain for the pathway for barre chords and faster movement along the frets is a crazy feeling. That sense of finally finding the pathways for singing to operate even SLIGHTLY separately from the rhythm of the guitar, those glimpses of polyrhythm? Addicting.
If you’re able, I hope you can teach him to find that pleasure of not mastery, but evolving strengths. Maybe it’s like an RPG where skills can be leveled up over time the more you use them. I know all too well the frustration of imperfection to start, ADHD during the 90s and the whole “perfect student” pressure created a lot I had to undo and still am, but each time I can break free of that it’s rewarding.
Well said. I will certainly do my best! 🫡
I’m 39 and I want to be instantly good at things. It sucks. Good luck breaking your nephew out of it.
Find things that don’t matter as much and work from there.
idk man. my ex was like this at 30. she just gave up on stuff if she wasn’t good at it immediately. made it very difficult to do things together
it was kind of weird because in most other aspects she was very mature. but not that one.
“what did students do before chatgpt?”
Is this supposed to be an actual quote? Like, someone said this unironically?
“what did students do before smartphones/tablets?”
“what did students do before laptops?”
“what did students do before the internet?”it’s not at all weird to me that this could have been uttered fully seriously.
Edit: only difference are those other technologies still requires critical thinking and won’t magically write your assignments. Unless plagiarized.
Grew up before the internet.
One thing I have come to realize is how much of history I learned passively from movies and comic books. The first time I saw Edgar Allan Poe was in an The Atom comic, and Julius Cesar was in a cartoon. Pretty much everyone I knew first hear classical music when they played it behind Bugs Bunny.
These days, there’s a tiny handful of historically based shows and movies compared to earlier times.
‘… and Julius Cesar was in a cartoon.’
Asterix taught me a lot of history too 😁
It was wrong but the vibes were there!
Not only that, but it sparked the interest. I lost count of how many things I saw in cartoons, comics, movies and TV shows that I simply had to know more about.
Another bygone method of learning things was by thumbing through the pages of an illustrated encyclopedia, like Golden Book Encyclopedia.
Yep.
Parts of Gen Z, and a lot of Gen A, will 100% seriously tell you that learning basically anything other than how to prompt ChatGPT is a stupid waste of time.
They’ll all go feral when they can no longer afford it or the power goes out or the system crashes for a significant amount of time, as they’ve never learned how to think, nor anything useful to think about.
I have no doubt about it…
Well of course. LLMs have been able to automate so many bullshit assignments for students. I am not talking about the ones where they actually have to learn about a subject that is important to things in life. But the ones where the entire point of the assignment is to write pages.
Education still hasn’t caught up with the many technological advances in the latest years. Some still act like it are the 1950’s.
Did you read the OP? The point is, writing pages of bullshit is how you get better at writing. It’s like saying “Oh yeah I don’t want to do all these bullshit exercises at the gym too build muscle I should just sit at home and let a robot do them for me” the whole point is building the skill not producing the assignment.
Yes I read it, and what I am saying is that modern day users don’t need to be able to write bullshit because of all the advances in technology.
Give purposeful assignment instead. You still get people to write and they learn something as well. 2 birds with 1 stone.
It is like forcing students to come to school using a steam train because they will know how to keep a steam engine working so it makes them better at shoveling.
The ability to construct a logical argument is useful not just for communicating with others, but also for structuring your own thoughts.
It’s also useful for learning. Turns out writing stuff down makes stuff go into your memory better.
I never had a single assignment in college where the only point was to write pages.
Cringe
We haven’t had LLMs that long. Are people seriously already forgetting the concept of learning skills?
Nah, people have been cheating and faking it forever.
In the U.S., the issue is that our education system is already fundamentally broken and doing a terrible job of teaching kids. Adding LLMs to that is like striking a match in the tinderbox.
I teach collegiate intro programming classes, I can say it definitely seems that way. My office hours will be an absolute ghost town, nobody has any questions for me in class, and then when a project is due about 1/3 of the submissions are AI slop.
I know cheating has always been rampant, but I’ve never seen it this bad before.
Are you allowed to fail them? Everything I’ve heard about primary and secondary school in the US is that teachers can no longer punish or fail to pass students who are cheating or failing or have major disciplinary problems. I hope that it’s different after high school.
I was told specifically to give them a second chance at the assignment for 50% credit. No disciplinary action was taken on the part of the administration with the justification that “if they really don’t know the material they’ll fail the final.”
So no, it’s just as bad in higher education here.
The future looks bright.
It makes the dumb even dumber. In 10 years we will see the effect of it, just like ipad babies.
Hate to be that guy, but you’re looking for effect here. You’re describing the effect (end result) of a change, not the affect (change) itself.
Haha yes, was typing too quickly.
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at least it took a bit more effort than just a prompt or two.
lucky if your search terms just bring up someone else’s work I suppose lol
ChatGPT land this plane with the engine failed for me. ChatGPT do this triple bypass heat surgery for me.
I’m sure that people will come up with excuses why this is different than cheating on an essay, but the point is that if one can’t study for the basic shit then doing the hard shit is going to be even harder. It’s not flipping a switch and saying “ok now I’ll take it all seriously…”. Then again, someone shirking basic work skills is probably destined for a retail middle manager job and not someone headed for radiology.
I’m a pilot and flight instructor. When I was a teenager, I would neglect English and Math homework to read my private pilot textbook.
See, there’s this guy named Edward Thorndike who described several basic principles of learning, including the Principle of Readiness. See, learning is an active process, takes effort to do, and effort sucks. So people will only endure the suck of effort if they genuinely believe they’ll get anything out of it. Students will best learn a lesson if they understand the value of the lesson to them in their lives. No, “you’ll never know when algebra will save your life” is not good enough. No, “Someday this might come in handy” isn’t good enough. Because of quiz-based game shows with million dollar cash prizes, that applies to literally everything from Mayan architecture to the seventh season of Friends.
My lived experience with essay writing is it was almost always an exercise in pointless pedantry. Thirteen years of public school and five years of college, I was almost always graded on punctuation, grammar, spelling, and strict adherence to the MLA style guide. One of the few essays that was graded for content was in an engineering class I took. We were to research a notable engineering failure, where something bad happened and an engineer was at fault. I chose the McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 cargo door and the two in-flight emergencies it caused. I cited the actual NTSB reports and the Applegate memo. Of all the essays I wrote for English teachers, I don’t remember the topic of a single one, my memories of writing them involve “Okay when it’s a periodical, the title is italicized, but when it’s in a journal…”
When teachers answer “Why do we have to learn this” with “it’s required for your diploma” literally don’t learn it. It is a mandatory waste of time designed to either be a bullshit tolerance exercise or included because it aesthetically resembles academics.
That doesn’t happen in aviation curricula because flying a plane fucking matters and there’s a point to everything we teach. Under part 61, anyway. Part 65 is full of horse shit. I went to mechanic school and learned there’s no such thing as an aircraft that’s safe to fly. I build furniture now.
What were we talking about?
ChatGPT land this plane with the engine failed for me
How bad is this on a scale of 1 to 100?
95 out of 100 This is catastrophic. Here’s why it’s a 95:
Landing Impact (40 points):
- Belly flopped onto a chicken farm
- Left wing occupied as a nesting box
Passenger Experience (35 points):
- Emergency slide covered in yolk
- Free eggs for all
…----
I had a friend in high school who did the hand drawing exercise, it does work. He got really good at drawing hands.
It works for everything. My dad made me tie a thousand knots because my shoelaces kept coming untied and now as an adult I am super in-demand in our local bdsm scene.
That did not go where I thought it would.
Boy scouts can lead to the same outcome
Father of the year!
That’s honestly how everything works. Nobody starts good at anything. If you want to be good at something, you have to suck first. You have to fail over and over and over again and learn a tiny bit each time as you hone your craft.
…everything else looked like shit, but the hands were amazing!
Also: being able to draw hands is the most important identifier of not being an ai.
not hard to be better than AI at drawing hands
It’s not snide to say “skills are developed with practise”. You want to de-skill by letting an idiot machine say wrong stuff while you rot? Go ahead.
I remember a comic I read at some point long ago, where power had gone out and a bored kid asks his grandma: “what did you do before TVs existed?” and the grandma says: “we would just sit around and wait for TVs to be invented”.
I’m now using that answer everytime I see a “what did you do before ___ was invented?”
I get the point, but often the answer to “what did you do before ___ was invented?” Is “we suffered and died”. Like vaccines for example.
“before tv was invented? Well we went out with other kids, where adults weren’t around, and got into trouble. As we got older we started fucking, and drinking, and getting into more serious trouble.”
I did all that after TV was invented.
Same, also after the internet, and social media. However a lot less people are compared to when I was a child.
Some of those things are pretty double-edged though. I grew up pre-Internet. Today, if a group of friends are standing around and someone says, “I heard that platypus eat bats,” someone will whip out their phone and say that’s bullshit in 30 seconds. Back in the day, we could ride our bikes to the library and find out, or maybe someone’s parents had encyclopedias, but we usually just didn’t care that much. On the other hand, because stuff wasn’t right at our fingertips, we had to reason a lot more things out. I feel like our critical thinking skills were better. Someone was bound to say, “Bats? How would that work? They live in the water and bats fly around eating bugs. I’m not buying it.”
And then there were those who had less good critical thinking skills and believed in lots of let’s say interesting things.
Yep, those folks have always been around. There was a weird thing when email became widespread. It turns out that there are (at least were) people who will reject a stupid thing if someone says it to them, but will believe the same stupid thing if they see it written. A giant number of early viral emails were things like “According to the New York Times, gangs are targeting people who wear people shoes.” Of course, the NYT never said that, it was all bullshit, but all sorts of people would swear it was true because papers were reporting it.
Wait do you mean to tell me that constantly slacking and taking the easy way will make me dumb and lazy?
I may be dumb and lazy, but at least I’m not, wait, what was the third thing?
